“A native UI can be presented much faster than a XUL based UI, since it can happen in parallel with Gecko startup,” said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering.

Nightingale's team is currently working with the add-on software development kit team to figure out the best way to support extensions in light of the new interface, he noted, as well as making plans to ensure that versions of the software for other languages don't get left behind, PCMag reported.

Mozilla plans to ship Firefox 8 and 9 with the current XUL-based user interface, including the version for tablets, Nightingale said.